


Artfully

by Celia_and



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Accidental Orgasms, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Banter, Bathing/Washing, Bisexual Poe Dameron, Bisexual Rey (Star Wars), Comfort, Crack Treated Seriously, Epistolary, F/M, Falling In Love, Feelings Realization, Pining, Public Sex, Sex as performance art, Smut, Texting, Vaginal Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-17
Updated: 2020-04-28
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:54:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23691913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Celia_and/pseuds/Celia_and
Summary: When Poe asks Rey and Ben to be in his sex-as-performance-art exhibit, they agree. What can possibly go wrong?A text fic based on a @reylo_prompts prompt.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 170
Kudos: 917
Collections: Reylo Prompt Fills (@reylo_prompts)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [binkleywtf](https://archiveofourown.org/users/binkleywtf/gifts).
  * Translation into Русский available: [Искусно](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24597478) by [Elafira](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elafira/pseuds/Elafira)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by the following prompt:
> 
> “Rey and Ben are simulating sex as part of an orgy art installation. There is penetration but they’re supposed to go slow to keep it ~classy. It’s Rey’s first time and it turns out she’s really sensitive with Ben so she keeps accidentally having orgasms. No one knows they’re real except Ben because he can feel her coming.”

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	2. Chapter 2

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	3. Chapter 3

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	4. Chapter 4




	5. Chapter 5

The doorbell rings sooner than Rey would’ve thought possible, although of course, she doesn’t know how far away he lives. Because she doesn’t know him. Or at least she didn’t until fifteen minutes ago.

She opens the door without hesitation or regard for her shower-wet hair or old pajamas. She holds on to the doorknob, though, for support. He just stands there for a minute, dazed, like he didn’t expect her to answer. He didn’t get nearly all the paint off: it’s dried into the creases by his nose and his hairline. He doesn’t say anything for a minute, and neither does she: just grips the doorknob so her knees don’t give way as he _looks_ at her.

She doesn’t know if her voice will work, but she tests it out. “You came.” She doesn’t know why there’s a tightness in her throat or a prickle at the corner of her eyes, because it would be silly to cry. “You came,” she repeats.

“Of course I came.” His voice is a deeper rumble than she remembers. Or maybe it’s always been that way and she’s never truly listened before. “You asked me to.”

“You’re still red.”

He raises a hand and checks it for lingering paint. “I didn’t spend long showering off. I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

She finally realizes that he’s still standing on her doormat and she steps back to let him in. He advances cautiously, like it’s a trick. When she closes the door, the lock clicks shut in the silent apartment with a kind of weighty finality that does nothing to dissipate the tension.

She turns to face him again and is seized with the overwhelming desire to do things for him. She wants to cook a feast and watch him eat every bite. She wants to wrap him in blankets and let him fall asleep in her lap. But instead she says, “I can run you a bath.” She looks up at him hesitantly. “Is that okay?”

His Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows. He nods.

Rey hastens from the room down the hall to turn on the bathtub faucet. She turns the handle until the water is just this side of too hot and slowly returns to the hallway. He’s still in the living room, standing where she left him. She pauses in the doorway. He doesn’t see her. She notices a dozen little things that she hasn’t before, or maybe she has but she never realized before that they _mattered_. Like the way his toes turn ever so slightly toward each other, or the way his shoulders hunch just a bit in an unspoken apology for taking up so much space. She hasn’t noticed how broad his back is, or the way the curve of his muscles are visible even through his shirt. And above all she notices how right it feels: having him here, in her home, where she can take care of him.

That overwhelming urge returns along with tears that gather and threaten to spill just as he sees her watching him. His face softens as he does, and she has to blink furiously to clear her eyes as she advances toward him.

“Ben, please.” She doesn’t even know what she’s asking, but from the look in his eyes she suspects that he might grant her anything. “I want...” She’s close enough to touch him, now, and reaches out to grab one button of his shirt. “I want to wash you off. Please, Ben?” She looks up pleadingly, still holding onto the button.

“Okay.” His voice is even deeper than before, if such a thing is possible. She doesn’t wait for him to change his mind, just leads him by the button to the bathroom.

She’s struck with a thrill of fear that if she lets him out of her sight even for a second, he’ll leave. So as soon as they make it to the bathroom, she shuts the door behind them and goes over to turn the tap off, then stands waiting while he undresses. He does it slowly and methodically. Unselfconsciously. She sees more red paint the more skin he bares to her. Without an outlet, the steam from the tub fills the room and fogs the mirror. When he steps out of his briefs and stands in front of her, naked, she’s struck suddenly by how infinitesimally short a time ago he was inside her. Barely three hours, and what’s three hours, in the scheme of things? What’s three hours, compared to six years?

She kneels down on the bathmat and he slowly approaches. It should feel like a subservient pose—her on her knees and him standing over her—but when he climbs into the bath and stretches out, he’s at her mercy. She flips the shampoo lid open and pours a generous palm-full.

Without her having to ask, he briefly ducks under to wet his hair, and she stretches her arms out to wipe the shampoo onto the top of his head. She slowly spreads it down his hair, letting her fingertips rub soft circles that barely raise a lather. The edge of the bathtub isn’t particularly comfortable against her ribs, water runs down her forearms and hangs in drops from her elbows, and the fluffy bathmat doesn’t entirely cushion her knees on the tile floor, but she doesn’t care about any of that. Because he’s _letting_ her. He’s sitting in her bathtub at her mercy with his eyes closed and letting her scrape her nails over his scalp.

The red runs off in rivulets, staining the water. It looks like blood. It looks like the blood of six years of unknowing hurts she inflicted on him as he watched and waited.

She presses on his forehead and he obediently ducks his hair to rinse it. She takes a pump of cleanser, mindful of the red that still lingers on his face. She dabs at it with one finger of her other hand and carefully paints it onto his cheek. Her fingertip finds the juncture at the side of his nose and soothes the cleanser into the skin there. Her finger is red by the time it makes its way to his jaw. There isn’t much of any paint to be found on his chin, but she’s drunk on the feeling of his flesh under her touch. The solidity of his bones.

But then she makes her way up to his forehead and he’s looking at her like she hung the moon and her eyes prickle. So she rinses her finger and takes another dab of cleanser to rub over his eyebrows and his eyelids, where there’s no red, none at all, but she needs him to close his eyes because they’re giving her too much love for her to hold all at once.

“Rinse,” she whispers, and he does.

He opens his eyes as she picks up the bar of soap. She applies it to his shoulder and he doesn’t close his eyes again. When she runs the soap down his arm, he winces and tries to hide it, and she sees the marks her nails left.

The tightness in her throat returns. “I _hurt_ you.”

He smiles softly. “It’s nothing I can’t handle.”

Her eyes spill over.

“Why are you crying?” he asks, with infinite tenderness.

The tears race down both cheeks. “I’m not crying.”

He gently traps the hand holding the soap to his arm with one of his own. “Why are you crying?”

Her chin quivers. She wipes her cheeks impatiently with her other palm. “I cry when I’m angry.”

His thumb strokes the back of her hand. The soap slowly wastes away in the water. “Are you angry?”

“No.”

“Why are you crying, Rey?”

_“Six years,_ Ben.” She’s truly crying now, with real sobs. “You were unhappy. Because of me. For _six years.”_

“I wasn’t unhappy,” he counters.

She hiccups wetly through a sob. “But you weren’t happy.”

He thinks for a minute. “I wasn’t happy, or unhappy. I was just waiting.”

She lets go of the soap and pulls her hand out from under his sharply, and slaps the surface of the water in frustration. It splashes his face, but he doesn’t recoil, just waits as she cries. She’s hardly intelligible through heaving sobs.

“You...should’ve said. You...should’ve...told me.”

She needs to hold onto him, so she does, kneeling up and grabbing both of his shoulders and pulling him toward her to wrap her arms around his upper back, heedless of the bathwater that wets her shirt over her breasts. His arms come up too, over the edge of the tub, and press her as tightly to him as they can. Her sobs soak into his wet hair. It’s a kind of mourning: for him, and for time. For so much lost time.

When her tears are finished and her sobs still, he lets her go and she sits back on her heels. He climbs out of the tub and quickly dries off and then it’s he who takes care of her, helping her to her feet and leading her down the hall to her bedroom. She follows like a sleep-drunk child. He sits her down on the edge of her bed and kneels down, still naked, and takes her flushed cheeks in both hands.

“Rey,” he says, “I’m going to go home now, and you’re going to sleep, and if you want to you can text me in the morning.”

She starts shaking her head even before he’s done talking, seized with a terror that wakes her up. “No.” She grabs his wrists. “Ben. Don’t leave. You promised,” she adds wildly, heedless of the fact that he did no such thing. “Stay.” She lets go of just one of his wrists, keeping a tight hold on the other as she clumsily pulls back the corner of the covers. She scoots inelegantly onto the middle of the bed and pulls him with her. “Stay.”

It’s in the moment when he slides into her sheets that she knows she’ll never let him go. But still, she makes herself say, “You can leave, if you want to, you know.”

“I know,” he says, looking dead in her eyes with an intimacy whose intensity should be terrifying, but for some reason it’s not. “I want to stay.”

He lies down and she curls up on his chest, wetting it again with the dampness of her shirt. She didn’t get all the paint off of him. It’ll stain the sheets.

Lying in his arms, Rey doesn’t care, not one single bit.

“Tell me things,” she murmurs.

“What things?” She feels the vibrations in his chest.

“Things about you.”

“Mmm,” he hums noncommittally, stroking her arm as it lies across his midsection. “How about I tell you things about you instead?”

“I already know about me,” she protests.

He bends down to kiss the top of her head. In his arms, like this, it’s easy not to be jealous of the other woman who once got to be in his arms. She snakes her hand underneath his back, between him and the sheet, and holds on.

They lie there for a while.

“I’m not sorry, you know,” he says quietly, just as she’s starting to get sleepy.

“Hmm?”

“That I went through with it. After I told Poe I would do it, I considered texting him back about a hundred times to back out. I was on the verge of doing it.”

“But it wasn’t so bad?” she asks, half-muffled by his chest.

“Oh no, it was awful.”

“What?!” She raises her head indignantly to look at him. “You’re saying I was awful?”

“I never said that, and I never will.”

She eyes him suspiciously, only partly mollified. “Why was it awful?”

“Because I was inside you but I didn’t get to kiss you.” He meets her eyes with an unguarded earnestness.

“You can’t just say things like that and not kiss me now.”

He sits up, bringing her with him until she’s straddling one of his thighs. He studies her face carefully, holding her upper arms in gentle hands built for strength. “I need to tell you something, and I need you to believe me.”

She nods solemnly.

“I’m not sorry I waited six years, either.”

Her hand flies up to touch his mouth, to try to put the words back in. _Six years._ “Why not?” she asks tremulously.

“Because if I’d told you the truth six years ago, or even three or one, would we have ended up here?”

_No,_ is her instinctive answer. She wouldn’t have been ready to hear without panic what his thumbs told her tonight. And now the warm ache that fills up her heart leaves no room for the fear.

He reads her answer on her face. “I don’t regret a second of what led to this moment in time.”

She’s either going to cry or kiss him, so she kisses him. She fastens her arms around his shoulders again and swings her leg over his other thigh so she can straddle him properly, pressing her body against his nakedness. When they break for air, she pulls back to look at the miracle and this time it’s he who’s crying. She kisses his tears with lips that try to reach inside to the old hurt and lonely and pull them out so there’s more room for her kisses, because she has _so_ many she needs to give him.

She pulls her shirt off and he looks and hardens and trembles but he won’t touch her, not until he begs in his turn, “Don’t leave.”

It’s easier than she ever could have imagined to smile and kiss him and say, “I won’t.”

_Then_ he flips her over and pulls off her pajama pants and panties and throws them aside and kisses his way up her body back to her mouth and when she spreads her legs for him, he doesn’t leave her wanting. The exquisite fullness returns and she hails it with a refrain of shaky gasps. But he doesn’t start to thrust because he’s too busy kissing her, because he’s allowed to kiss her now and she’s allowed to kiss him and _fuck_ Poe and his rules, because this is the only way it should ever, ever be.

Finally she whines and squirms, chasing their pleasure, and it’s only then that he hitches her knee up around his hip and begins the torturous rhythm that makes her see stars. She’s not herself; she’s reduced to whimpers and incoherent cries and shuddering. She’s only vaguely conscious of the way he studies her face for every twitch, every spasm that tell the secret of her pleasure and the key to her peaks. Because his rhythm builds and slows over and over and every time it pulls a new quake from her flesh. She grabs for a sheet or a pillow or _anything_ to tether her to earth and he guides her hand to his hair and offers her that instead. She’s falling, she’s flying, she’s his, and there’s nothing left of her but a cunt for him to stretch and a face for him to kiss. It lasts an eternity and it still ends too soon, with his moan and his come in that place where no other come has ever spilled.

“How,” she says nonsensically when her breath returns, “how. Ben.”

He chuckles, draped on top of her. He’s spent, as she is, but not too much to prop himself up on his elbows and look down at her face as if he’s seeing it for the first time. His softened cock slides out of her and she cries out quietly at the loss.

“Ben,” she says, reaching up to stroke his brow like she owns it, “I need to tell you something.”

He tenses, steeling himself. “Okay.”

“I stopped hooking up with people, a few months ago.”

A heartrending hope steals over his face. “Why?”

“I don’t know, really. I think...” She takes a deep breath. “I think I was waiting, too.”

He doesn’t answer, he just kisses her with lips that taste like forever, then he reaches over to turn off the lamp and tucks her into his embrace like she belongs there.

And she does.

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**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I decided to come off anon—it’s me, [Celia_and](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Celia_and/)! 💛 I’m so proud of how this first true text fic of mine turned out, and I very much hope you enjoyed it!
> 
> I wrote this originally on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/CeliaAnd2), which is where I do a lot of my writing—feel free to come visit if you’d like! 🤗


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